Sheepishly wearing a bright blue T-shirt with the Superman logo, Alberta Minister of Innovation and Science Lorne Taylor announced the awarding of a $193 million contract to extend broadband Internet access throughout the province.
By the time the Alberta Supernet is completed, every school, hospital, library and government facility will be able to access the Internet at speeds comparable to what city dwellers with high-speed cable and ADSL connections already enjoy. Local business will also have a better chance to get broadband Internet connections in about 390 communities that don’t have it now.
There’s no doubt that this project pushes Alberta into the forefront of Web connectivity in North America.
When it’s finished in three years, fairly high speed Internet access should be available just about anywhere in the province.
But what will life be like when we have fast Internet lines to everywhere? Will it just mean our kids can download pirated videos as fast as they grab mp3 audio files? Or will we come up with new kinds of imaginative content to fill these big pipes?
One obvious application is in education. Let’s say you’re a bright high-school student in a small Northern Alberta town. You want to take a course in calculus or German or maybe even motorcycle repair. But there’s no teacher in your school qualified to teach the subject.
Right now, if you’re lucky, you can take a rather dry correspondence course and perhaps rely on telephone tutors and local teachers for help. But the local French teacher might not really be very good at helping you conjugate those Deutsche verbs.
Strike one against people living in rural communities.
Another strike comes when they need to see a doctor, especially a specialist. For good reasons, these people tend to locate themselves in urban centers, near to facilities such as operating rooms, MRI machines, and teaching hospitals. It may not be so bad to journey into a city once in a while, but patients with chronic ailments often bristle at long drives just for a quick visit with a city doctor.
We know that slow speed Internet, the kind you get with a phone modem, just won’t allow the kind of credible medical examination doctors want to perform. They often need to see high quality images of skin lesions, or to watch how a person moves and walks. These applications require bandwidth in the 10 megabit per second range, which is what Alberta Supernet plans to provide.
A third strike against people in rural areas has been the difficulty in operating any kind of data-intensive business.
If a company can’t make do with conventional telephone access, it was faced with some pretty complicated and expensive options like getting a satellite connection or leasing a dedicated data line. This provided a barrier to companies that wanted do to things such as sending large video clips. How about Alberta’s cities? Is there much in this announcement for them?
Yes, say experts like Deputy Minister of Innovation and Science Roger Palmer. Having provincewide connectivity will open up new markets to urban-based businesses, allowing them to do consulting and sell digital content more broadly.
By being first in North America, Palmer, says, Alberta will get to set the model for how this is done in other jurisdictions.
The winning bidder, the Bell Intrigna Consortium, has also proposed a new way of organizing the telecommunications business.
It used to be that the phone company was a monopoly. This policy served to get the country connected and ensured that POTS (plain old telephone service) was reasonably priced everywhere in Canada, even in high-cost service areas in the North.
As competitors emerged, the phone companies were ordered to lease them certain facilities, such as the “local loop” into your house, at fair market rates. Of course, most people have tended to stick with their legacy phone company, in our case, Telus.
In this new model, anybody who has the resources can be involved in Alberta’s telecommunications business.
So, for example, a pair of universities could own a strand of fibre in a sort of “condominium” fibre-optic cable. This should bring about lower, and more predictable pricing for telecommunications services.
The $300-million question (because that will be the ultimate total cost of this network — the Alberta government is only covering about two-thirds) is: What will be flowing on all that fibre?
I know that many schools, colleges and universities are working feverishly to produce quality online courses.
There’s no doubt that high-speed service will allow them to add more content such as video clips. But there are still huge barriers that have nothing to do with bandwidth.
Canada is a small place and Alberta is even smaller. We’ll need to agree that, for example, there’s no such thing as Anthropology for Albertans or even Calculus for Canadians if we are going to see reasonable economies of scale in producing and distributed electronic education materials.
In a similar vein, medical associations are working to approve standards for quality medical care by electronic technology. After all, nobody wants a radiologist to miss a tumor because the quality of a digitized X-ray wasn’t good enough.
In fact, the American College of Radiologists has addressed just such issues in policy statements. Doctors will also need to adjust their mindsets, and their daily calendars, if telemedicine is to become a reality.
The biggest challenge may be in the area of getting businesses to take advantage of this broadband service. Think of how hard it was to get some people to use e-mail!
Videoconferencing has been around for more than a decade and is still rarely used by most people. Probably the next thing we need to do is to develop (or haul back from the U.S.) some top-notch experts who can lead us in the creative use of all this bandwidth that’s about to appear.
With the infrastructure, and the right people, Alberta really will have a Supernet that’s worth’s crowing about.
Web Watch:
www.innovation.gov.ab.ca/supernet
